Category Archives: Gunwalker

One of the guns funneled to Mexico via the Obama administration’s fatally flawed “Operation Fast and Furious,” was found at Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s hideout in Mexico, sources confirmed to Fox News Tuesday.

The weapon found is a “.50-caliber rifle that can stop a car or, as it was intended, take down a helicopter.”

After the raid on Jan. 8 in the city of Los Mochis that killed five of his men and wounded one Mexican marine, officials found a number of weapons inside the house where Guzman was staying, including the rifle, officials said.

When agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives checked serial numbers of the eight weapons found in his possession, they found one of the two .50-caliber weapons traced back to the ATF program, sources said.

Federal officials told Fox News they are not sure how many of the weapons seized from Guzman’s house actually originated in the U.S. and where they were purchased, but are investigating.

Out of the roughly 2,000 weapons sold through Fast and Furious, 34 were .50-caliber rifles that can take down a helicopter, according to officials.

Federal law enforcement sources told Fox News that ‘El Chapo’ would put his guardsmen on hilltops to be on guard for Mexican police helicopters that would fly through valleys conducting raids. The sole purpose of the guardsmen would be to shoot down those helicopters, sources said.

This marks the third time a weapon from the Fast and Furious program has been found at a high-profile Mexican crime scene, according to Fox News.

Ironically, the purported purpose of Operation Fast and Furious was to see how high up the chain U.S. guns went in the international drug trafficking, crime syndicate Sinaloa Cartel. Now we know.

The operation involved federal agents allowing criminals to buy guns in the United States with the intention of tracking them to the drug cartel in Mexico.

Instead, because the guns lacked tracking devices, and because ATF agents were actually blocked from tracking the guns, they wound up in the hands of the cartels, who proceeded to use them with predictable results. Ultimately, the only way for the weapons to be tracked was when they were recovered at crime scenes in Mexico or the United States. The ATF lost track of 1,400 of the 2,000 guns involved in the sting operation. Hundreds of Mexican citizens and at least two Americans have been slaughtered with weapons from this criminally insane program.

Conservatives have long suspected that Operation Fast and Furious was the Obama Administration’s first attack on the 2nd Amendment.

Emails released in 2011 revealed that ATF big shots wanted to use the illegal gun sales in operation Fast and Furious to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3”. The new rule would require U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” The fancy name, Demand Letter 3 comes from the fact that it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information. If that’s how then name projects, why didn’t they name Fast and Furious, “Asinine Project 1?”

Fast and Furious was a sick attempt to deprive Americans of their Second Amendment rights by selling guns to Mexican Gun cartels. The program was a train wreck whose effects are still being discovered.

In June of 2012, former Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt by Congress after he refused to divulge documents for a congressional investigation into the matter. Not that Holder cared. In February of 2013, he told ABC News the contempt vote didn’t bother him at all considering who voted in favor of it.

“It’s something that I think was unfortunate,” Holder said. “I think it’s a result of this kind of partisan sport that I think we engage in here in Washington far too often.” He added, “but I have to tell you that for me to really be affected by what happened, I’d have to have respect for the people who voted in that way, and I didn’t, so it didn’t have that huge an impact on me.”

Now, after three and a half years, a federal judge has finally rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress access to records pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled Tuesday that the Justice Department’s public disclosures about its response to the so-called “gun walking” controversy undercut Obama’s executive privilege claim.

“There is no need to balance the need against the impact that the revelation of any record could have on candor in future executive decision making, since any harm that might flow from the public revelation of the deliberations at issue here has already been self-inflicted,” Jackson wrote. “The Department itself has already publicly revealed the sum and substance of the very material it is now seeking to withhold. Since any harm that would flow from the disclosures sought here would be merely incremental, the records must be produced.”

“While the decision doesn’t give us access to all the documents, it is an important step forward,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement Tuesday. “We will continue investigating until we get to the truth.”

You probably didn’t think it was possible to be anymore disgusted and outraged at our corrupt and depraved government than you already are.

But I’m here to disabuse you of that notion because new information coming out of the latest Regime document dumps coupled the knowledge that the GOP is likely going to sit on their hands for the next couple of years rather than do anything about the lawlessness – should do the trick.

Said DOJ flack Matthew Miller to Holder in an email on October 3, 2011:

2. Find a way for you to get in front of a reporter or two about this. You don’t want to call a press conference on this because it will blow things out perspective, but if you have any events in the next few days (preferably tomorrow), you could find a way to take two or three questions on it afterwards. Or if that’s not easily doable, you could find a way to “run into” a couple of reporters on your way to something. Maybe Pete Williams, Carrie, Pete Yost — that
part can be managed. Most important is that you’re in front of a camera in a relaxed manner giving a response you have rehearsed…It would be ideal if those two things happened in the same day so you didn’t have two news cycles of responding — you want to do it all at once. There may be things you need to do to go on offense as well, but I think most important right now is that you answer the charge about covering this up. Then you can move to offense.

[Note: Pete Yost of AP wrote article on Bush-era gunwalking case that seemed to so impress Holder, he wrote ” WOW!” p. 539 AP presented the story as if it were “new” although I had published on the case, Wide Receiver, months earlier, with an exclusive interview with a confidential informant from the case.]

The more I think about the offense versus defense part, I do think you should go on offense, too. After explaining what happened, you could go back at them by saying something like: “But let’s be clear what this is all about. I’ve ordered an investigation into what happened. But there are people on the Hill who don’t care about what really happened. For them this has become about scoring political points and weakening an agency charged with cracking down on gun violence. There are a lot of powerful lobbyists and their allies on the hill who have wanted to cripple the ATF for a long time, and they’re using this as an opportunity to do so. I’m not going to let them. Its clear the ATF made mistakes here. We’ve cleaned house, and we’re going to fix the agency, but we’re not going to allow it to be put out of business by people carrying water for the gun lobby.” This part has to be really carefully crafted of and delivered, but I think it could be effective as a one-two punch. (One, explain what happened with your testimony; two, punch back.)

The IRS has already turned over thousands of Lerner emails to congressional investigators but has said the remainder are gone forever because Lerner’s hard-drive crashed in 2011. And in June, agency Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress that back-up tapes containing the missing emails have been destroyed.

“The IRS has continually dragged its feet, changed its story, and been less than forthcoming with information related to its egregious violation of Americans’ First Amendment rights,” said Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has spearheaded congressional probes on the issue.

“These e-mails are long overdue, and underscore again why we need a special prosecutor to conduct an unhindered investigation. Hopefully these e-mails will help us get to the truth,” he continued.

Frederick Hill, a spokesman for Republicans on the Oversight committee, says that “it could take weeks to learn their content because they are encoded.”

President Obama has opened a new front in his hard line against the incoming Republican Congress by releasing more detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, against lawmakers’ objections.

The Pentagon announced Thursday that four al Qaeda fighters from Yemen, including a senior figure who facilitated travel to Afghanistan for Arab extremists, and a Tunisian extremist would be transferred to Slovakia and Georgia.

The transfers leave 143 detainees at Guantanamo, which Obama has vowed to close. Republican lawmakers, who have been pressing the administration to stop releasing detainees amid reports that some former prisoners had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, were furious.

The Administration had set 7 million as its goal. It was very important, politically, that they be able to claim that had met it.

Alas, only 6.97 million people signed up for Obamacare.

So you know what time it is.

It’s time for an Obama “mistake” that just coincidentally enough happens to aid him politically — the Administration made a whoopsie-daisy and “accidentally” included almost 400,000 dental plan sign-ups in the health care figures, thus meeting its 7 million sign-up goals.

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama’s moves on immigration would expand the labor force and increase worker productivity, according to a White House report Friday that estimates average wages would rise over a 10-year period.

The president’s critics and even some labor allies dispute that claim.

About that House Intel panel report that has liberals so amped up because it supposedly exonerates the Regime of any wrong-doing in the Bengazi scandal. (yes, it’s still a scandal – why do you think Intel Chairman is retiring so abruptly at the tender age of 51?)

Those of you familiar with the Benghazi Brief will note the alignment and expectation of the Rogers/Ruppersberger report. Their report is exactly as we anticipated it would be.

With a House Select Committee (Trey Gowdy) already in place, you might rightly ask yourself why did Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger even produce a report? As you read their House Intelligence Panel Report on Benghazi it is important to note a few key aspects:

• This is not a House Intelligence “Committee” report on Benghazi. This is only two committee members writing a report based on prior information.

• Both Rogers and Ruppersberger would have been briefed on the CIA operations in Benghazi during 2011/2012 as the covert operation began.

• President Obama signed a finding memo in 2011 permitting Operation Zero Footprint to begin. The congressional “gang of eight” held oversight responsibilities.

• Rogers, Ruppersberger along with Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Saxby Chambliss and Diane Feinstein would have been notified of the presidential authorization. In 2011 they were the congressionalGang of Eight. Their lack of oversight reflected a willful blindness to the operation.

The Rogers/Ruppersberger Report is specifically designed, by wording, to provide political cover to both parties – Republicans and Democrats within the Gang of Eight particularly included, and protected.

Saturday on C-SPAN’s Book TV, CIA Benghazi annex security team members Kris Paronto and Mark Geist answered questions about a report released Friday by the House Intelligence Committee on the 9/11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in 2012. The two former CIA contractors pushed back forcefully against parts of the the committee’s conclusions about the night that Ambassador Chris Stevens, U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed in Benghazi.

Fifty years after President Johnson started a $20 trillion taxpayer-funded war on poverty, the overall percentage of impoverished people in the U.S. has declined only slightly and the poor have lost ground under President Obama.

Aides said Mr. Obama doesn’t plan to commemorate the anniversary Wednesday of Johnson’s speech in 1964, which gave rise to Medicaid, Head Start and a broad range of other federal anti-poverty programs. The president’s only public event Tuesday was a plea for Congress to approve extended benefits for the long-term unemployed, another reminder of the persistent economic troubles during Mr. Obama’s five years in office.

“What I think the American people are really looking for in 2014 is just a little bit of stability,” Mr. Obama said.

Although the president often rails against income inequality in America, his policies have had little impact overall on poverty. A record 47 million Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more than when he took office.

The poverty rate has stood at 15 percent for three consecutive years, the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s. The poverty rate in 1965 was 17.3 percent; it was 12.5 percent in 2007, before the Great Recession.

About 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the federal government defined in 2012 as an annual income of $23,492 for a family of four.

A leading pro-abortion and gay rights activist who visited the White House numerous times has been charged with sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy.

Terrance P. Bean, 66, is a major Democratic donor and helped found the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund.

According to The Oregonian, Bean was arrested at his Portland home on Wednesday and charged with two counts of third-degree sodomy and one count of third-degree sex abuse for an incident involving the underage male that occurred in 2013 in Eugene, Oregon.

For some inexplicable reason, Eric (Why is this man still Atty General?) Holder doesn’t want to hand over a detailed list of the thousands of documents being withheld from Congress under Obama’s Executive Privilege claim.

A federal Judge ordered the DOJ to produce the “Vaughn list” back in July in response to a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit. A month later, a federal judge ordered the DOJ to turn over “a privilege log of withheld documents to the House Oversight Committee.” Both requests are supposed to be completed by October 1, but get this – Eric (why is this man still Atty Gen?) Holder is stonewalling da court.

Attorney General Eric Holder is again asking a federal court to delay the transfer of disputed documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious to a House committee.

In a new court filing Monday night, Justice Department lawyers asked U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson not to require Holder to turn over any of the roughly 64,000 pages of documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee until after her rulings can be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

“The Department respectfully submits that it would be preferable for the parties, this Court, and the D.C. Circuit — if an appeal were taken — to have any injunctive order await the conclusion of the district court litigation to allow for orderly and complete appellate proceedings,” DOJ lawyers wrote.

Jackson has previously denied DOJ permission to file an immediate appeal, although lawyers for Holder indicated in the new filing (posted here) that they may do so anyway. Any appeal is likely to take months and perhaps more than a year to resolve. If that process does not begin until Jackson rules definitively on the the executive privilege claim President Barack Obama has made for many of the documents, the timeline for the case being resolved could begin to approach the end of the Obama administration.

Townhall’s Katie Pavlichsays, “how convenient that the appeals process will bump right up against the end of Obama’s, and therefore Holder’s, time in office.

This tactic and strategy has been used by Holder since the beginning to run out the clock until a new administration comes into office and dumps the case.

Regardless, Holder is still required to produce a list of documents by October 1, which will give us significant insight into the kind of documents the Department of Justice is trying so desperately to hide.

It would be nice if that now archaic concept – “rule of law” were still in force in this country. But as you may have guessed – as far as the ruling class is concerned, that is quite a thing of the past. Every technique the Obama regime has used to get away with scandal after scandal will be used by every administration to succeed him – and when the fundamental transformation is complete– we’re most of the way there – those administrations will be Social Democrat because they will have achieved their long sought after permanent majority. I guess congratulations are in order before they take us over the cliff.

Of course there were attacks on US Embassies in terrorist hot spots throughout the world during the Bush era. We were fighting two hot wars as part of what used to be called – “the global war on terror.” But there were major differences between these attacks and Benghazi, including the fact that in most of the examples no Americans died, there were no requests for more security that were ignored, and there was no active cover-up after the attack. They were not “just like Benghazi” at all.

Bush readily admitted that we were fighting a global war on terror. But Obama wanted the nation to think that he had decisively won the war after Osama Bin Laden was assassinated. The war on terror was over. Now, we just had overseas contingencies and workplace violence and demonstrations over Youtube videos.

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The left uses dishonest defense strategies to protect Obama and they have used them time and time again to explain away his scandals. They mischaracterize past events to draw some sort of moral equivalency – which often involves blaming Bush. It looks good on the surface, but falls apart upon close scrutiny. But it doesn’t matter how weak their false equivalency is, because the strategy is geared toward BDS-ridden O-bots who are inclined to agree with them and not do any independent fact-checking. They just want to be spoon-fed what to think, and the Alinskyites running the show right now, are happy to provide them with the nonsensical pablum they need to fulfill their preconceived notions about a world in which every enemy has an R after his name.

The charges stemmed from an incident at a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008 when three members of the party were accused of trying to threaten voters and block poll and campaign workers by the threat of force — one even brandishing what prosecutors call a deadly weapon.

The three black panthers, Minister King Samir Shabazz, Malik Zulu Shabazz and Jerry Jackson were charged in a civil complaint in the final days of the Bush administration with violating the voter rights act by using coercion, threats and intimidation. Shabazz allegedly held a nightstick or baton that prosecutors said he pointed at people and menacingly tapped it. Prosecutors also say he “supports racially motivated violence against non-blacks and Jews.”

The Obama administration won the case last month, but moved to dismiss the charges on May 15.

Olbermann, recently fired Washington Post analyst Dave Weigel, and The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer have all crowed that Bush’s Justice Department dropped a criminal case against the NBPP. In fact, there never was a criminal case to drop. The NBPP faced a civil lawsuit prepared by Justice’s Voting Rights unit. This is exactly what career prosecutors recommended in the first place.

With respect to all but one defendant, Justice abandoned its civil case under Obama, not Bush — no matter what Olbermann and his comrades would like to believe.

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During the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, in which thousands of high powered guns were allowed to fall into the hands of criminal gun cartels, Democrats constantly tried to argue that the Obama administration’s Operation F & F, was a continuation of “Wide Receiver”, a failed gun-tracing operation that the ATF briefly tried under George W. Bush. Democrats often used the Wide Receiver narrative during Congressional hearings, and Jay Carney used it when questioned by reporters during press briefings.

They were lying.

Besides the fact that they were two separate operations, Wide Receiver actually made an attempt to track the guns that were headed into Mexico – guns were implanted with RFID chips and were tracked electronically. The ATF in Phoenix also implemented aerial surveillance tactics in an attempt to follow the weapons.

Obama’s ATF took no such steps to track the walked guns other than recording the serial numbers before allowing them to cross the border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. ATF agents involved with Fast and Furious would later testify that they were ordered to stand down and not track the weapons even when interdiction was possible. The objective was to get them into the hands of drug cartel bandits only to be interdicted after they had killed people – at which point, they were traced back to the gun shops that sold the guns to straw purchasers (at the ATF’s behest.) It was not a “botched operation. It was totally effed up from the start.

The Bush administration also worked in cooperation with the Mexican government. When about 200 guns were lost track of – the operation was terminated in 2007.

Mexican authorities were kept in the dark over Fast and Furious and were outraged when the details about the criminally insane operation were revealed. The operation started in the Fall of 2009 and not terminated until Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered with one of the Fast and Furious Guns in December of 2010.

A good question for Eric Holder would be why would the DOJ resurrect a program like Wide Receiver after it failed – but he would tell you he had no idea about it or Operation Fast and Furious. He testified that he didn’t even know about Fast and Furious until well after Brian Terry’s death in Dec. 2010. Any emails that might say otherwise have been protected by Executive Privilege.

There are still liberal drones out there who will knowingly tell you that Fast and Furious is a GW Bush scandal because it was a continuation of a Bush era gun-walking operation.

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Remember Solyndra? The solar company that went belly-up after the Obama administration awarded them with an ill-advised half a billion dollars loan? That was Bush’s fault,too, you know.

After spending months touting the Obama administration’s decision to loan $535 million to the California solar energy upstart Solyndra, top officials took a new tack Wednesday while testifying before Congress about the company’s abrupt shut-down and bankruptcy: the loan, they said, was actually the Bush administration’s idea. The Energy Department’s top lending officer told Congress that the Solyndra loan application was not only filed during President Bush’s term, but it surged towards completion before Obama took office in January 2009.

“By the time the Obama administration took office in late January 2009, the loan programs’ staff had already established a goal of, and timeline for, issuing the company a conditional loan guarantee commitment in March 2009,” said Jonathan Silver, who heads the Energy loan program.

This argument has been pushed repeatedly by the Democrats on the Energy and Commerce committee, by liberal groups like Media Matters and even by the Energy Department itself, which has been emailing reporters regular press releases spinning the scandal.

For example, Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce investigation subcommittee, asked Friday, “Whether the Bush and Obama administration conducted due diligence on the loan guarantee.”

But the facts don’t justify this claim. The bottom line remains that the Bush Administration did not approve the Solyndra loan guarantee. And just before they headed out of town, Bush officials ordered the project back to the drawing board.

Democrats argue the Energy Department first received the loan request in December 2006. By January 2009, it was still under consideration. That month, the department’s Loan Guarantee Credit Committee put the project on hold.

IBD concluded, “there were two administrations involved in this project. One, after more than two years of consideration, was still sending it back for further review. That was the Bush administration. The second was placing “intense pressure” on department staff to approve loans from the moment it walked in the door and even had the energy secretary himself personally reviewing each loan. That was the Obama administration.”

It would be like a Republican administration coming into office after Obama, immediately approving the Keystone Pipeline, and when something horrible goes wrong – trying to share the blame with Obama because he’s the one who “established the goal” of approving the pipeline.

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The IRS Scandal: One defense strategy the left has employed to defend the Obama Regime is the laughable “Progressive groups were targeted too!” false narrative. I’ve actually seen them try to argue that progressive groups were targeted even more than conservative groups. I mean if you’re going to lie – go big, right?

This would already seem obvious given the fact that absolutely no progressive groups have come forward with horror stories about the abuse they supposedly endured as a result of being targeted and unfairly scrutinized. Congressional Democrats had every opportunity to let this alleged multitude of “progressive IRS victims” testify before various committees during several hearings that have been held on Capitol Hill on the scandal. Not-so-shockingly, no progressive victims have been identified and none ever testified.. Because they don’t exist.

There are still liberal drones who spread that particular brazen lie in the comment sections of our nation’s newspapers.

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Be on the look-out for this particular defense strategy. Now that we see the pattern, it should be obvious when we see them employing it.

The VA scandal is in its infancy, but I fully expect the left to blame the scandal on Bush era policies that Obama is heroically fixing. If they haven’t done that already.

One of the more disgraceful legacies of Eric Holder’s tenure as Obama’s Attorney General, is the increased bloodshed we will be dealing with in the years to come on both sides of the Southern border because of his criminally stupid false flag Operation Fast and Furious..

A CNN report broadcast on Tuesday revealed that guns released to Mexican gangs as part of the Fast and Furious “gun-walking” operation are continuing to show up at scenes of violence sound of the American border. According to the CNN report, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives acknowledged that more weapons released into Mexico are likely to continue surfacing in the coming years.

During an interview in October of 2011, an inscensed Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu blasted Atty General Holder for engaging in what he called a cover-up and outright conspiracy which has “risen to the level of criminal.” He claimed that his deputies and American citizens in general will be facing the barrels of the Fast and Furious guns well into the future. “We couldn’t make this stuff up in our wildest nightmares,” he said.

“2000 semi automatic, fully automatic AK 47s, 50 caliber rifles, my deputies don’t even have this firepower in AZ and we’ve given it to these people we’re fighting, and now the Atty General of Mexico has been attacking the US publicly, demanding accountability, demanding criminal charges against the government. And President Obama who’s gone on this worldwide tour to apologize for America (which I’ve always disagreed with, and been embarrassed by) – the one apology he should be making is to Mexico. 200+ people according to their attorney general have been murdered – have been killed by these very weapons that Holder and his group of accomplices have handed to them. And now, Brian Terry a hero in our border patrol, who served as a police officer, who served in the US Marine Corps, was murdered on American soil, in my state, and you’re about to hear the Sheriffs out here unleash upon Eric Holder. We asked for help to fight against the cartels, to fight illegal immigration, secure the border, and what we got back was a lawsuit, to sue our state, to fight us for enforcing the law – the very job that we’re sworn to do – put up billboard signs in my county warning American citizens that it’s not safe to travel because of drug cartels, and now they’ve armed the very enemy we’re fighting…This for us is more than personal — our deputies, our citizens are going to be facing in the future the barrels of guns that our own government has given to criminals. We couldn’t make this stuff up in our wildest nightmares.”

He went on, “this clearly was a plot by our government (I’ve never been one to buy into conspiracies – but this is as clear as day to me) It’s as clear as day to me this was an effort by Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano to make an aggressive assault against 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms…”

Like this:

Back in October, The Weekly Standard reported that the ATF had denied ‘Fast and Furious’ whistleblower John Dodson the right to publish his book, using the excuse that the agency is allowed approval over “outside employment.”

As if to thoroughly burnish the ATF’s deserved reputation for incompetence, here is the note the bureau sent Dodson denying his request to publish his book, as quoted in the Washington Post: “This would have a negative impact on morale in the Phoenix [field division] and would have a detremental [sic] effect on our relationships with [the Drug Enforcement Administration] and FBI.”

On CBS This Morning, Monday, Sharyl Attkisson touted Dodson as “a rare example, especially amid the Obama administration’s war on leaks” because he has been able to keep his job, while most whisteblowers in the Obama era end up losing their jobs.

His new book, “The Unarmed Truth,My Fight to Blow the Whistle and Expose Fast and Furious“, was eventually cleared for publication, but Dodson is forbidden from collecting compensation for it because of ethics rules.

Attkisson, whose reporting on the arms trafficking scandal won CBS a Edward R. Murrow Award, spotlighted the ATF senior agent’s new book on “the inside story of why he went public to expose the government’s false denials about its gunwalking secrets.”

The correspondent also pointed out how “there’s still a court battle over the ‘Fast and Furious’ documents that President Obama is withholding from Congress under executive privilege“. She also featured a clip from Dodson where he emphasized that this is an ongoing controversy that deserves more media attention: [MP3 audio available here; video below]

JOHN DODSON: Part of all of this is to try to make people realize that it hasn’t all been answered. You know, it’s not – it’s not over. It’s just that you’ve forgotten about it. You’ve been – you know, diverted. Don’t look at my left hand – look at my right. What’s going on over here? These things haven’t been answered, and you can make a difference. Ask the questions!

The Obama administration had invented some argumentative blather about the federal courts having no basis for arbitrating the dispute because it would mean that all document fights between Congress and the administration could end up in court rather than being resolved through good-faith negotiation, or something.

District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson (an Obama appointee, by the way) all but laughed that silly excuse out of court: “Dismissing the case without hearing it would in effect place the court’s finger on the scale, designating the executive as the victor based solely on his untested assertion that the privilege applies. … The Court rejects the notion that merely hearing this dispute between the branches would undermine the foundation of our government, or that it would lead to the abandonment of all negotiation and accommodation in the future, leaving the courts deluged with subpoena enforcement actions,” she wrote — and the Obama administration certainly didn’t like that.

A couple of weeks ago, the DOJ appealed that decision..

The new motion (posted here) asks Jackson to allow the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to weigh in on that question before the case continues.

“Absent settlement (which depends on the willingness of both parties to achieve a negotiated resolution), or an immediate appeal, this Court will proceed toward deciding the scope of the President’s assertion of Executive Privilege in response to a congressional demand, and will do so absent a definitive ruling from the Circuit that such a novel judicial inquiry, in a suit instituted by a Committee of Congress, is appropriate under the law, including the Constitution,” the DOJ motion argues.